
Moompetam Festival Marks 20th Anniversary
By Emma Rault, Columnist
“Our people were here for thousands of years — where you’re standing, here at the aquarium, before all of this was here,” Cindi Alvitre told a little red-haired boy and his purple-haired mom at her booth outside the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach.
Alvitre, an artist and a professor at Cal State Long Beach’s American Indian Studies department, is a descendant of the First People of the Los Angeles Basin, known variously as the Tongva, Gabrielino, or Kizh. Like the other Indigenous peoples along the Southern California coastline, their cultural heritage is intimately tied up with the ocean.
At the annual Moompetam American Indian Festival, these different nations — which include the Tongva, the Chumash, the Costanoan Rumsen Carmel Tribe, the Acjachemen, the Payómkawichum, and the Kumeyaay — share some of their stories, traditions and cultures with each other and the wider public. Pronounced “MOHM-peh-tam,” the event is named after the Tongva word for “people of the ocean.” This year, the festival took place on Sept. 14 and 15 and celebrated its 20th anniversary.
“This is a model of our canoe, Moomat Ahiko,” Alvitre explained to the little boy. “That means ‘Breath of the Ocean.’”
Alvitre is co-founder of the Ti’at Society, established in the late 1980s to renew Tongva boating traditions. A ti’at is a redwood plank canoe, sewn together and caulked with tar. It takes three miles of twine to lash a canoe, Alvitre says.
Some of her ancestors are from the Harbor Area where, for many millennia, paddlers would travel between the mainland and Catalina Island, originally called Pimu.
The ti’at is a powerful symbol of resilience — because the arrival of European settlers in the mid-18th century violently and systematically disrupted Indigenous ways of life.
“We have endured four waves of encroachment,” explained Kumeyaay educator and community leader Dr. Stan Rodriguez, whose people are indigenous to San Diego County and northern Baja.
First came the Russian trappers and fur traders. Then the Spanish established a network of missions along the coastline. The missions were radically different from the way people tend to imagine them. They weren’t just places aimed at spreading Christianity among the Indigenous communities. In fact, people were held against their will and endured forced labor, starvation, disease, and physical and sexual abuse at the hands of Spanish priests and soldiers.
It was due to these missions — which reached up as far as San Francisco — that Indigenous people in Southern California ended up losing their coastal land base earlier than the nations farther north.
Rodriguez explained that many people fled the coast and sought safety in the more rugged inland areas. “But the part that they gave up was the vast knowledge and resources that came from the ocean.”
The onslaught on Indigenous communities continued through the Mexican period when the system of ranchos — large cattle farms — deprived Indigenous people of their land and food security. Many were forced to work as ranch hands in conditions of de facto slavery.
The Gold Rush in 1848–49 and California statehood brought an influx of Anglo-Americans, and things got even worse. State militia, vigilantes, and federal soldiers began systematically murdering Indigenous people. In just 27 years, the state’s Native population plummeted by 80%.
This policy of state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing gave way to nationwide forced assimilation through family separations, forced relocations, and boarding schools where children were brutally punished for speaking their own language. Until as recently as the 1970s, Indigenous cultural and spiritual practices were systematically repressed or outlawed altogether.
“We are the survivors of a holocaust,” Rodriguez said.
The maritime traditions — whether they have tenaciously persisted or are being revived after a period of dormancy — are crucial to healing and community-building.
“As a native Kumeyaay, for me coming back to the ocean is reaffirming my connection with the land. Our creation story says that we came from the ocean. The whole ecosystem plays a huge part in our culture. Fishing, hunting and gathering, collecting seaweed, when the grunion run … All these things reaffirm our place in the universe.”
At the Moompetam Festival, Rodriguez teaches people how to build boats from tule reeds harvested from marshes on Kumeyaay and Tongva lands. Indigenous people used these boats to travel the rivers and wetlands, fish, and hunt for whales out on the ocean.
Long, cylindrical bundles of dried-out tule, each with a reinforcing willow rod tucked in the middle, are cinched tightly together with twine to create a vessel some 8 feet long, with raised gunwales and tapered ends.
Over the course of the weekend, Rodriguez and a team of boat builders — Native and non-Native, ranging from seasoned paddlers to intrigued passers-by — build three tule boats from scratch, culminating in a boat race in the harbor.
“People often come to North America, and they see [the countries of] America, Canada, and we think that’s the culture of this land,” said James Musselman, a computer scientist from Ventura who was at the event. “I think it’s important that we appreciate the culture that was here already.”
Inside the aquarium, elders share songs of the ocean, as in the giant, curved tank behind them, a sting ray flashes its white belly, swimming up on a diagonal as if to say “hello.” Dancers’ regalia glimmers with abalone and Olivella shell beads.
At the same time, it’s impossible to be at this event without reflecting on another sobering reality — the dire state of our water ecosystems.
“There’s so much damage being done to our ocean relatives,” says Tina Calderon, a Gabrielino Tongva, Chumash, Yoeme and Chicana culture bearer who serves as the director of the Ocean Protectors Program at the Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples, an organization that focuses on Native-led environmental advocacy.
“Whether it’s DDT that’s being thrown into the ocean, offshore wind, offshore oil, the [sewage] spills we see, the poisons that run off into the ocean — it’s just constant,” she said. “It’s time we give our ocean personhood again.”
Personhood — as if the ocean is one of the people you know and care about. Calderon’s words echo writer Evelyn McDonnell’s call for a “water ethic” in her inaugural “Bodies of Water” column in RLn earlier this year.
“I know how many beautiful villages we once had here, on these short mountain ranges that surround the water … and the water was pristine.” Now, Calderon said, when she comes out to the Harbor Area and smells the oil, it’s painful.
The decimation of LA’s wetlands is another example of the environmental toll of the past century. Many were drained for construction or have dried up due to the damming and channelization of the rivers. By some estimates, LA County has lost more than 95% of its original wetland habitats.
“There’s a lot that we have to do,” Cindi Alvitre said. “This festival is a segue into those conversations for me.”
While Indigenous activists are laboring tirelessly to bring these issues to wider public attention, nations in Southern California are forced to work with limited resources. Many aren’t “federally recognized,” which means they have no protection from the government, no land base, and no financial support in trying to recover from centuries of oppression. (Experts argue that the criteria for federal recognition are fundamentally rigged against Indigenous people, often failing to consider the specifics of Indigenous governance systems and the rupturing effects of colonization.)
“Even though our roots are deep into these lands and waters, there’s only so much we can do,” Tina Calderon said. “We really depend on our greater community.”
Last year, in a major victory, the Bolsa Chica Mesa in Huntington Beach was returned to Indigenous stewardship. The Acjachemen Tongva Land Conservancy will be focusing on nursing this important coastal land back to health.
Another exciting collaboration is coming soon to San Pedro: the Moomat Ahiko has found a new home at AltaSea where, in the longer term, the Ti’at Society will have space to build more boats.
Stretched across the roof of Cindi Alvitre’s canopy tent is a fishing net hung with various shells, an art piece she made for an exhibit at the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum to resemble the Milky Way. Over the course of our conversation, she shared two hopes for the future.
One: She wants LA children to be able to see the Milky Way.
Two: She envisions a fleet of Indigenous boats coming into LA for the 2028 Olympics. “Pacific Islander, Cambodian, Irish… We’ll have a thousand tule boats. I’m starting to speak it now.”